Saturday Review: “On the Bus with Al Maginnes,” a review by Jim Clark of Al Maginnes’s Fellow Survivors (2023)
Regular NCLR reviewer Jim Clark opens his review by considering the importance of a “Selected Poems” collection for a poet’s career. Not only is it a convenient collection of a poet’s work, but it also serves as an indication of a poet’s achievements and “sets the stage for what is to come – the poet’s continuing, mature work.” Clark argues that Fellow Survivors is just that, celebrating Maginnes’s work while offering a tantalizing peak at the future of his poems.
A fellow poet, Clark then leads us on a trip through his own recollection with Maginnes’s work, asserting, “Here is a poet who knows what work is, I thought (and still think), and knows that despite being constructed from rough cobblestones, a poem can be an avenue to transcendence.” The review goes on to discuss old favorites in Maginnes’s new book as well as newer poems that display “Maginnes’s great gift of empathy.” Clark emphasizes how Maginnes’s poems reflect the lives of his readers, both in small, everyday details and in historical, universal experiences, “adding to the sense of inclusion and recognition that Maginnes’s poems often elicit.”
Fellow Survivors showcases some of Maginnes’s best work and celebrates his well-deserved literary achievements. For new readers, it serves as a wonderful introduction to Maginnes’s poems, “But for those initiates among us who look to Maginnes and his poems to calibrate our internal gyroscopes and record our testudineous progression through the zeitgeist, this book only makes us hungry. Hungry for the next poem, the next dispatch from one who possesses one of the keenest antennae of the race, as Ezra Pound once defined the role of poets.”
Read the complete review in NCLR Online Fall 2023, and buy the novel from your local independent bookstore.
